Conviction and plea bargain rates. Most (>90%) people who are charged (in the US) end up with either a guilty verdict or a guilty plea. IIRC even the ones that don't plead out are ~90% conviction rate, at least at the federal level.
Doesn't jive at all with what we know of competence and bias levels observed in police and prosecutors in the US.
Most people plead out because they’re ridiculously guilty.
I’m a crunchy hippie on criminal justice, but I’ve also seen these cases first hand working for an appellate judge. Prosecutors go after cases that are open and shut. You wouldn’t believe how much evidence there is in a typical case that doesn’t go to trial. They have the guy on CCTV with stolen goods in his car and cell phone records of fencing.
Innocence Projects weed out hundreds of meritless requests for help for the relatively few meritorious cases they take.
I was on a jury for a trial where they had crap on the kid accused of conspiracy to create meth.
He drove an old high school friend, who he hadn't seen for years, to a park. He drove into a parking lot on the way and turned around "as if trying to avoid tails." He returned to the car and the undercover cop put the key back in his hand after putting ingredients in the car.
AND...he was being accused of conspiracy (which raises the seriousness of the crime to a felony!) to create meth because...there were drug ingredients in the car and the keys were in his hand. He'd spent his time at the park napping on the grass with his hat over his head. Or, as the cops testified, "probably acting as a lookout."
We of course said "not guilty." No one even wanted to argue. No idea why they thought they had a case.
But the kid in this case was white. I could totally see a black kid deciding that accepting a "lesser plea" would have been preferable to taking a chance on a 95%+ white jury (was in a predominantly white area; I don't think there was a single black juror, though I wasn't keeping count).
> Most people plead out because they’re ridiculously guilty.
Most people plead out because they can't afford expensive trials.
It's also a rational choice when prosecutors promise that they'll throw the book at you if you go to trial, and it's often your word against the word of cops, prosecutors and the expensive expert witnesses they can afford to hire but you can't. Juries and judges tend to side with law enforcement because they're authority figures and valued members of the justice system, after all.
People who can’t afford a lawyer will have a public defender appointed. Virtually none of these cases involves expert testimony. My wife did a pro bono murder trial a couple of years ago. (If your case is at all interesting high end law firms will often represent you for free.) They showed the jury CCTV from all over the city literally following the accused from murder scene to his house. Just cutting from one camera to the other showing the jury exactly what happened after the murder.
Instead of recycling conventional wisdom, head over to your local federal court and sit in on some sentencing hearings (these are public). There will be a plea colloquy with the accused and the prosecutor will lay out all the supporting evidence. It’s quite eye opening.
It's a little strange to me to think that the system would be working optimally if most people went to trial. A very big reason you don't take your criminal case to trial is if the prosecutors have you dead to rights, and the risk to reward is bad. If most people went to trial, that'd suggest that prosecutors are taking a lot of fliers on cases that they don't have strong evidence on. Which seems like... a bad thing?
The issue is that to a jury, being in the defendant's seat is strike one, having a cop testify against you is strike two... it doesn't take much to convict the innocent if a DA and the police start pushing for it.
Ok, but that makes my argument stronger: if trial wins are practically a lay-up for the prosecution, you have to be prosecuting seriously dogshit cases to make going to trial attractive for a majority of your defendants.
Is your argument that marginal cases would go to trial?
I think it is the case that marginal cases would take a no-jail plea bargain. Going to trial on a marginal case with a public defender probably increases the risk of imprisonment versus taking a guilty plea that guarantees no jail time (but a criminal record).
What I'm saying is that in a well run DA's office, a docket consisting mostly of cases that plead out is what you'd want to see, because the alternative suggests that prosecutors are bringing shaky cases to court, which they should not do, because prosecution itself inflicts grievous costs on defendants.
Sure, but that is indistinguishable in the numbers from an out of control law enforcement system where there is a high conviction rate against even the innocent that leads to higher incidence of innocent people making a guilty plea to avoid jail and expense. Of course, that percentage isn't broken out because everyone in here is innocent.
> Most people plead out because they’re ridiculously guilty.
I know many innocent people who plead out to avoid jail because they're looking at $250k in legal bills and a ~90% trial conviction rate. Juries, being amateurs, are not very good at avoiding bias, as they are completely untrained.
I'm not so sure that plea bargain rates are indicative of guilt either way.
I am completely sure they are not indicative of anything, in any way, shape or form. Besides legal expenses and risk of being convicted anyway, being in jail tends to result in being fired, defaulting on your home and car loans, and leaving your family destitute.
Yeah, and there are a lot of people who are most likely guilty who never even get charged. A prosecutor won't want to take up a case when he thinks the evidence is in the zone between "preponderance" and "beyond reasonable doubt".
If the prosecutor can get somebody to plead guilty before they are charged, then he doesn't even need to think about the value of the evidence--or, indeed, about whether the person actually did anything. A guilty plea is even better for his reputation than a conviction, because he can get lots of those done in a day.
Sure, somebody who looks prepared to lawyer up often won't be charged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
I believe that to be "working as designed" we would see a lot more guilty people going free than innocent people being convicted.